REVIEWS IN BRIEF / Hermit in Paris

Published 4:00 am, Sunday, April 6, 2003

"Life is monotonous here," the late Italian novelist Italo Calvino wrote when visiting San Francisco in 1960. "I did not meet any exceptional people. . . . I had no success with women." Lest San Franciscans take offense, let it be known that Calvino's views of most of what he saw in the United States were equally sour. Los Angeles, he concluded, is "a source of despair." Washington is "artificial, boring, and very elegant." Savannah, Ga., is "a boring, fussy city." New Orleans is "decadent, decaying, smelly, but alive." Alive though it may be, the
Big Easy

Only New York truly pleased Calvino; he called it "the most spectacular sight that anyone can see on this earth." But even Gotham, home to millions, has its downside: "Very attractive women are rare."

Calvino's musings on America, from a diary he kept for two years, are the most satisfying of his writings assembled in the posthumous "Hermit in Paris." Crank that he could be, making sweeping cultural generalizations that were no doubt fueled by his loneliness overseas, Calvino could still compose pithy entries that are as astute as they are stinging. Leave it to a fabulist to see similarities between Americans' beloved 1950s tail fins and "missiles . . . film-actresses' eyes, and the full repertoire of Freudian symbols."

In other engaging -- though sometimes overlapping -- essays, Calvino describes how writing became the ideal profession for someone who grew up as a social outcast. (His parents, both scientists, fought to keep him out of religious classes and services in Fascist Italy.) This outsider, ever curious, pops up, Zelig-like, at a number of unlikely places in the States, from a beatnik party in New York (where he spots Allen Ginsberg, "with his disgusting black straggly beard") to a ballet soiree in Alabama (where he is left with the impression that the Southern aristocracy is "uniquely stupid").

Among the surprises from this former communist who railed against capitalism and consumerism: He was a fan of Las Vegas. "I seriously like the place," he writes with a rare burst of joy. "This is a productive, brash society enjoying itself as a community."

One wonders if Calvino, who died in 1985, would have enjoyed Paris Las Vegas more than he did his eventual adopted home, the real Paris. It was there,

late in life, that he became, in his words, a hermit. With age, his popularity waned, and he began to drift into anonymity -- a fact he readily acknowledged. But remaining hidden in the French capital is exactly what he wanted, Calvino maintained to the end: "When I find myself in an environment where I can enjoy the illusion of being invisible, I am really happy."